Specs + tests for CTS

In February, Chris Blackwell and I released a release candidate version of the CTS protocol specification, 5.0. Today, we are releasing a second release candidate, in parallel with a suite of tests packaged with a servlet that can run the tests and format the resulting report in a web page.

We are currently working on a third release candidate taking account of all the helpful comments we have received so far on rc.1, and plan to continue coordinating releases of the CTS protocol specification with parallel test suites. We expect that rc.3 will be the last candidate version before a final CTS 5.0.

All our released work on the CITE architecture now belongs to a cite-architecture group on github. For a guide to our repositories, see the organization home page on github.

Visualization from CITE URNs + d3 + hive maps

Many software packages make it relatively easy to create visualizations of complex networks of data, but often produce hairballs that tell us more about the visual layout algorithm than the structure of the network. Martin Krzywinski has proposed an alternative, called hive plots: lay out your nodes along a series of axes that you know have meaning in your network, and explore the network visually from there. Mike Bostock, predictably, has done gorgeous interactive work with Krzywinski’s idea in the d3 javascript library.

I created my first hive plot this morning using d3. The screen shot above illustrates a project by Megan Whitacre (Holy Cross ’14) annotating a series of illustrated inscriptions for use in teaching introductory Latin. The five axes are (clockwise beginning from the blue axis at the top) 32 broad grammatical concepts, 71 narrower topics about the morphology of substantives, 55 topics about verbal morphology, 9 syntactic topics and, along the purple axis, 103 images. All of Megan’s annotations are expressed with CITE URNs; this makes it straightforward both to gather all references to the same image, or to apply her region of interest to highlight areas of the image. d3 practically begs for interactive displays, so you can highlight nodes or edges to see further information, or can click on image nodes to see the image with linked, highlighted areas for all references to the image.

There is plenty of room for improvement. Selecting a node or edge really out to select all direct connections to it as well, and hovering should use Megan’ rdf:Label values, instead of the raw CITE URN to identify the node, to name two obvious desiderata. But as an initial effort put together between second cup of coffee and lunch break, it’s hard to be disappointed with it. It underscores for me that as our tools improve, it becomes more and more important to have properly structured and properly citable data.

(The screen shot is linked to a live version of the graph.)

bl.ocks rocks

http://bl.ocks.org/ occupies an interesting space in the overlap of coding and writing. It lets you simultaneously view the rendering of a source page and its source code, together with commentary in the form of a README. Each bl.ock is defined simply as a github gist that follows the naming convention README.md for commentary (in markdown), and index.html for source file to be both rendered and displayed in source view. This is extraordinarily powerful when index.html is a single-page web application, of the kind that D3 (http://d3js.org/) encourages you to build – and Mike Bostock, the main developer of D3, just happens to be the inventor of bl.ocks as well.

bl.ocks are a great way to pull away the curtain and illustrate how a particular analysis or visualization works, and studying other people’s bl.ocks can be a fast route to learning a new technique.

From work with Christine Bannan on the Phoros project, I’ve put up this bl.ock as we begin to map changing patterns of Athenian tribute over time:

Links

• Phoros project github repositories: http://phoros.github.io/
• Phoros project test site: http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/phoros/